Free Art of the Lie by Delphine Dryden Page B

working with brocade quite a bit lately. Lots of monochrome, for some reason.”
    She pulled a gray-on-gray scarf from the bag of samples she’d brought, and spread the fine fabric across the glass coffee table in front of them. As she’d suspected, the strong lighting in the office and the neutral background of almost-white carpet under the glass made the colors in the scarf pop. Not just gray, it was a thousand subtle shades of gray, a mosaic of hues and varying luminosity like a rainbow spun from spider silk.
    “Oh! Exquisite!” Stephen immediately cooed and grabbed the pretty stuff for a closer look, prompting another smile from Paul.
    “Well, that’ll distract him for a while,” he said, as if discussing a toddler who’d found a new toy. “I think we can add that one to the list. It’s looking like four handbags and about half a dozen scarves for this round, and I think we can pretty much work from these samples as prototypes. Well done, Melinda.”
    “Lindy,” she corrected him. “My friends call me Lindy.”
    “Lindy,” he repeated. “I like it. I may forget and call you Melinda from time to time, though. I sort of think of you as Melinda already, and I like that name too.”
    Lindy was surprised enough to learn Paul thought of her as anything that she didn’t catch Stephen’s question about one of the handbags until he repeated it. She had thought he was still absorbed in the gray scarf.
    “The bottom of this? We could use a stiffer leather to give it a little more structure. I think it would hold the sides out more evenly, show off the design better.”
    “Oh. Yeah, I agree. I usually don’t work with very hard leathers,” Lindy explained, “because I just don’t have the equipment for it. But I agree, that would be a good idea.”
    “Mel—sorry, I mean Lindy,” Paul corrected himself with a grin, “I wondered about the silk in this scarf. It’s vintage, isn’t it? So we’d need to look into a more readily available alternative to that.”
    She couldn’t help but be impressed that Paul knew the silk was old, and from the look on Stephen Markham’s face he was likewise impressed. “Yes, it’s vintage. From the thirties. I bought a trunk full of old fabric remnants and a few full bolts of upholstery silk at an estate sale a few years ago, dirt cheap, and I still use those a lot in my work now. But honestly, that was just a lucky find and I use it to save on costs, not because of any artistic vision. Nonvintage is fine with me.”
    “Okay, good to know. Stephen, maybe you should be writing this down?”
    “Oh are we doing this right now, then? Talking about changes?” He was clearly pleased with the idea.
    “I think so,” Paul confirmed. “Unless you had any objections, Lindy? We don’t have a contract drawn up yet, I don’t want to pressure you about it. But since we’re all here, maybe we can go ahead and discuss some possible ways to make things work for manufacturing purposes? It’ll be good for you to keep in mind from now on, anyway.”
    “Absolutely,” she said, tamping down her pang of anxiety about moving so quickly. She didn’t want to lose the opportunity that was right in front of her just because she was too scared to reach out and grab it. “We’ll just keep it hypothetical.”
    Within minutes, she and Stephen were bent over samples, with Stephen scrawling notes on a legal pad while Lindy looked over each of her pieces with a fresh eye. She learned a great deal in a short time about what types of changes might be needed—hypothetically, of course—to make her quirky, eclectic pieces more amenable to large-scale production. And she was surprised to find that, for all his deliberate flamboyance and vocally gushy love of fashion, Stephen was also almost encyclopedic in his knowledge of producers and suppliers, the intricate vagaries of sewing machines at various factories, the current market rates for leather and countless other details. It made Lindy’s